I’ve searched for 2 days on what is happening, but can’t come up with the answer.
I just purchased a new Dell system (Inspiron 3891). It has a 8g of ram and 256g nvme HD. I’ve downloaded the latest copy of FreePBX. When I go to install it, my system doesn’t see a hard disk. However, the system boots up to Windows if I don’t do anything. I’ve also tried to install Ubuntu from USB and it seems to be working like it should (I cancelled out of the install). It seems like the FreePBX install doesn’t recognize the NVME drive.
I would install Linux Mint 64bit. Install the app Virtualbox and finally install freePBX as a virtual machine.
The advantage is that you can easily access your freePBX server using e.g. noMachine…and you can easily backup your freePBX server by creating backups within Virtualbox.
That’s the way I do it. Why Linux Mint? Because it is rock solid and does not need any restarts like Windows.
Once the CD or USB is booted up, try switching over to a shell console (ALT-F2, or maybe ALT-F3… just keep trying them… and one of them will get you back to the installer). Try lsmod and look for nvme to see whether the driver is loaded. If not, try modprobe nvme to load it. You might have to do some manual configuration of the disk if the installer can’t handle it.
I’m not sure the bios has a legacy boot. That was what I was looking for yesterday, but didn’t have any luck. I did disable secure boot yesterday so it would read from the thumbdrive.
I did switch that, but the install process just hangs. It also makes Windows crap the bed too. Not sure why it wouldn’t complete the install process after that.
If I try to boot from USB after changing from RAID to ACHI, the the FreePBX install starts, but it hangs and doesn’t finish or throw an error. I know what you mean about Windows, I’m just saying it was hanging too.
This isn’t relevant to OP, but FYI there’s a registry key you can change to avoid having to reinstall windoze in situations like this. (Learned the hard way when all preinstalled systems came with ATA mode in the BIOS rather than AHCI… couldn’t figure out why performance was so bad until I discovered that. )
There is. I forget about that, because it has been such a long habit to change this as soon as I unbox. With the second thing to install Windows clean instead of using the Dell image.
Yeah - they include lots of bloatware on new machines. In my situation, they came pre-installed with clean windoze & some software we needed; wiping all of them would’ve been a pain. Glad I found the registry key to ‘fix’ the install.
I probably will end up going this route if I can’t get the ISO to install. This is real mind boggling. I don’t understand why I can boot and install Ubuntu if I wanted, but it will not let me do that with FreePBX. It is being weird.
My hunch is that the version of the nvm module in CentOS isn’t as new as the version in Ubuntu and that is why it’s not being seen. Sorry I can’t be of more help, but I’ve very little knowledge about CentOS outside of PBXact - use Lubuntu on most of my linux machines.
It has many advantages to run freePBX inside Virtualbox. Your freePBX server can be easily transferred from an old hw system to a new one. You just export the VB image on the old system and import it on any new machine (Linux, MacOS or Windows) running Virtualbox.
The current freePBX distro obviously is missing something and does not support your hardware (out of the box).
So I would set the Bios settings back to the original settings and use just one partition on the harddisk. There you install the OS of your choice, preferably Linux Mint.
Perhaps it would be cleaner for the publishers of SNG7 to upgrade their up line kernel module support to include likely hardware that they hadn’t envisaged but are now common.
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